The Letter
SplashCast will be discontinuing its free service for publishers effective 12:00 AM June 1, 2009.
We’ve made this decision given our focus on developing our “Social TV” product and expanding our TV application network.
Three months ago, we asked you (our publishing community), whether you would be willing to pay for the service. The vast majority answered "no." Furthermore, among those willing to pay, the average amount was extremely low. We discussed this in more detail in an earlier blog post.
Additionally, advertising is not a realistic option. We’ve explored several approaches. While we love your content, advertisers aren’t willing to pay a reasonable price to sponsor it [As an aside, this is the issue that YouTube faces on a monumental scale.]
Beyond subscription fees and advertising, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about other, more creative, approaches. The unfortunate conclusion is that continuing our free service does not make business sense (we even considered a public broadcasting-like pledge drive).
We’ve listened. We’ve thought creatively. We’ve weighed the alternatives. We’ve slept on it.
In terms of alternatives, you might check out a service called Embedr. Here is a recent review on the ReadWriteWeb blog. If you know of other services, please let us know.
Thanks for being a part of the SplashCast community. This is a tough (and sad) decision for us. We hope that you can understand that, as a startup, we have to focus.
Sincerely,
The SplashCast Team
[Actual date of post 5/19/09]
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